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Thread: Justin Alan Helzer - California

  1. #1
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    Justin Alan Helzer - California


    Ivan and Annette Stineman


    Selina Bishop


    Jennifer Villarin


    James Gamble






    Summary of Offense:

    From July 30, 2000 to August 3, 2000, Justin Helzer and his cohorts, Glenn Helzer and Dawn Godman, killed five people in an extortion and murder scheme. Helzer and his cohorts kidnapped Ivan and Annette Stineman, forced the Stinemans to write $100,000 in checks, killed them, dismembered their bodies and dumped the body parts in the river. Helzer and his cohorts then killed and dismembered Glenn Helzer’s girlfriend, Selina Bishop, because they were afraid she would be able to testify about their plan if they were caught. They also shot and killed Bishop’s mother, Jennifer Villarin because they were afraid she knew too much. They also killed Villarin’s friend, James Gamble, because he was present in the apartment when they went to kill Villarin. Justin Helzer pled not guilty by reason of insanity but was found guilty by a jury. During the penalty phase the defense argued Justin Helzer was mentally ill and thought his brother was a prophet of God.

    Justin Helzer and Glenn Helzer were sentenced to death in Contra Costa County on March 11, 2005.

    Dawn Godman was sentenced to 38 years to life.

    For more on Glenn Helzer, see: http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...rnia-Death-Row

  2. #2
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    January 23, 2010

    Justin Helzer attempts death row suicide by jamming pens in his eyes

    San Quentin death-row inmate Justin Helzer, convicted in 2004 of murdering 5 people, including the daughter of blues guitarist Elvin Bishop, tried to kill himself and is hospitalized in critical condition, sources confirmed Friday.

    Helzer apparently tried to commit suicide by jamming pens in each of his eyes. Although he didn't kill himself, the sources said Helzer did succeed in paralyzing himself on the right side and causing brain damage.

    California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terry Thornton said the injury was self-inflicted, and the reason Helzer was trying to hurt himself was under investigation.

    A Contra Costa County Superior Court jury found Helzer guilty of killing Selina Bishop, the 22-year-old daughter of Elvin Bishop, her mother, her mother's boyfriend and a retired Concord couple who once hired Helzer's older brother as their financial adviser. The killings were part of a botched extortion scheme targeting the elderly couple.

    The dismembered remains of Bishop and the elderly couple were discovered in August 2000 in duffel bags floating in the Mokelumne River in the Delta.

    Helzer's brother, Glenn, and their roommate, Dawn Godman, pleaded guilty. Glenn Helzer is also on death row and Godman is serving a lengthy prison sentence.

    (Source: The Sacramento Bee)

  3. #3
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    San Quentin Death Row Inmate Commits Suicide

    San Quentin death row inmate Justin Alan Helzer, who was convicted in 2004 of five murders in Concord and in Marin County in 2000, committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell Sunday, San Quentin State Prison Lt. Sam Robinson said this afternoon.

    Helzer, 41, used a sheet attached to his single-cell’s bars to hang himself, Robinson said.

    A San Quentin corrections officer found Helzer around 10:17 p.m. during a security check, Robinson said.

    Helzer tried to kill himself three years ago by jabbing pencils and pens into his eye sockets. He had been under more intensive watch since then, but showed no recent signs to indicate he was at risk of another suicide attempt, Robinson said.

    Helzer’s brother, Glenn Taylor Helzer, 42, is under intensive screening on death row to make sure he also is not at risk of killing himself, Robinson said.

    The Helzers were sentenced to death by a Contra Costa County Superior Court jury for killing an elderly couple, Ivan and Annette Stineman of Concord; 22-year-old Selina Bishop, the daughter of blues guitarist Elvin Bishop; Bishop’s mother Jennifer Villarin, 45, of Novato; and Villarin’s friend, James Gamble, 54.

    The Helzers and their roommate Dawn Godman were alleged to have committed the killings as part of a murder and extortion plot to use stolen money to bring “joy, peace and love” to the world and to bring about the second coming of Christ, according to statements made in court during their trials.

    Justin Helzer was sentenced to death for the murders of the Stinemans and Bishop. He received life with the possibility of parole for the murders of Villarin and Gamble.

    Glenn Helzer, who had been the Stinemans’ stockbroker, was sentenced to five death sentences.

    Godman pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2003 to nearly 38 years in prison.

    Dive teams found the dismembered remains of the Stinemans and Bishop inside several gym bags floating in the Sacramento Delta in August 2000.

    Villarin and Gamble were found shot to death inside Bishop’s Woodacre apartment.

    http://sfappeal.com/2013/04/san-quen...mmits-suicide/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    October 29, 2012

    From an interview with KALW's Nancy Mullane:

    MULLANE: Hello

    HELZER: I have a lot of medical problems.

    MULLANE: I’m just doing a story on conditions on death row. What do you think about conditions on death row?

    HELZER: Well, just speaking from a medical standpoint, it’s hard to see the doctor. For instance, I only see a doctor once every two or three months. Unless it’s a visible problem then the nurse will schedule an appointment prior to my scheduled rotation.

    MULLANE: How long have you been here?

    HELZER: I’ve been here since 2005, but I was arrested since 2000, so I was fighting my case in county jail for five years.

    MULLANE: Are you guilty?

    HELZER: Yes. I killed people.

    MULLANE: You did kill people?

    HELZER: Yes, I killed two people. The point is, I’m not – I wrote a letter of apology to the family members of the deceased. I apologized. It was so misdirected. I’m so sorry. It’s like a past life. I’m so not that person anymore. So, I don’t have a problem admitting what I did. I’ve taken responsibility for it. I’m not proud of it. To say it was a mistake is a huge understatement. I can’t express how sorry I am. It was so unnecessary, but I don’t want to talk about my case, I don’t want to talk about my case.

    MULLANE: So you are vision impaired?

    HELZER: I’m totally blind. What it was was it was a suicide attempt. I stuck two five inch pens into my brain through my eye sockets. It didn’t kill me.

    MULLANE: When did you do that?

    HELZER: About a year and a half ago. And so it left me blind and partially paralyzed.

    MULLANE: But before that you were fine?

    HELZER: I had perfect vision, yes. I was tired of death row. It was a failed suicide attempt. And so I was left with paralysis, partial paralysis and complete blindness which they call vision impaired. So that’s me.

    MULLANE: How do you feel now that you’ve done that and now you’re living?

    HELZER: Terrible. I’m not interested in committing suicide anymore. That was a year and a half ago. I embrace my situation. I’m more okay with the way things are now. I’ve learned to accept the way things are now. But the conditions on death row are such that it can lead one to attempt to commit suicide or to attempt to do whatever. They’re not good here.

    MULLANE: How does it compare not having sight to having sight on death row?

    HELZER: Well, sight was much better.

    [Unlike other cells, Helzer’s cell is void of personal effects. While we talk, he sits on the edge of his bunk and turns his face toward the cell door. Mullane asks him for his thoughts on Proposition 34, which could change his death sentence to life in prison without parole.]

    HELZER: I look forward to it. I think it’s the next step of a society that wakes up and realizes this is so unnecessary. It’s all politics. And right now the people are buying into the political story. Oh, death row – tough on crime. It’s not a deterrent. The death penalty is not a deterrent. Because I’ll tell you why. One, when people do commit crimes, they are not thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I might get the death penalty if I do this.’ They’re in the moment. They want what they want. They have short-sighted… They don’t foresee the consequences of their actions because they’re impulsive. They do whatever they do. Whatever crime it is. They’re not thinking about the ramifications. The notion that the death penalty is somehow a deterrent is a false premise. It’s what people want to be true. Not true.

    MULLANE: What if people say they want the death penalty because they just want people punished.

    HELZER: Let me tell you…[laughter] you can punish people plenty by giving them Life without the possibility of parole. Besides, there are people here on death row 30, 40 years and they haven’t gotten killed and they have so many more appeals left to them. So no one’s getting killed. No one’s getting executed.

    MULLANE: How do you see the rest of your life?

    HELZER: I don’t know. I just take one day at a time. One day at a time.

    http://kalw.org/post/walking-death-r...n-state-prison

  5. #5
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    Inmate attorneys allege mental health crisis on Death Row

    Justin Alan Helzer’s suicidal tendencies were hardly a secret.

    He dropped out of college in 1998 because of suicidal thoughts, according to court testimony. Within two years, he was arrested in the slayings and dismemberment of five Bay Area residents, whose bodies were stuffed into duffel bags and dumped into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. He announced during the ensuing trial that he would be better off dead.

    Sentenced to die in 2004, his psychotic episodes and delusions continued once he arrived on death row at San Quentin State Prison. He blinded himself in 2010 by thrusting ballpoint pens through both eyeballs, and overdosed twice, with methadone and then heroin.

    Despite this, Helzer was never referred for psychiatric treatment and hanged himself in his cell last April, leaving a trail of ignored warning signs that an expert in forensic psychiatry testified Wednesday was unprecedented in his experience.

    “I’m sort of losing my ability to adequately express my amazement at how this case was progressing,” Dr. Pablo Stewart testified in federal court in Sacramento as part of a landmark effort by inmate attorneys to make a case for overhauling California’s treatment of mentally ill inmates.

    Helzer, who was 41 at the time of his death, was identified in court only as inmate “WWW,” but the incidents described were clearly drawn from his life. He was one of several inmates whose cases are being presented to U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton as examples of what Stewart called “woefully inadequate” mental health care on death row.

    The state maintains that mental health care services provided to inmates have improved dramatically in recent years and now rival what is available to private citizens. Attorneys for the state argue in court papers that “San Quentin staff has superior knowledge, experience and training concerning inmates who remain in their care for years and, perhaps, decades.”

    Attorneys for the inmates, in contrast, contend that mentally ill prisoners, particularly condemned inmates, still have minimal access to treatment.

    Their argument is not likely to win over the victims’ rights advocates and criminal justice experts working on an initiative for the fall 2014 ballot that would speed up the time between conviction and execution in California. Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, noted that if Helzer had been convicted in Virginia, he more than likely would have been executed long before he committed suicide.

    “I don’t dispute that as long as they are incarcerated there is a requirement to provide medical care,” Scheidegger said in an interview. “The length of time that we are required to provide that care is a result of the failure to enact reforms.”

    The attorneys for the inmates say the level of mental health care for condemned prisoners is so substandard that Karlton should order a mental health assessment of death row prisoners and creation of a psychiatric center there to handle all levels of treatment.

    Currently, condemned inmates deemed to have serious psychiatric needs can be sent to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, but Stewart testified that they are held there in single-celled “severe isolation,” with no group therapy, no ability to interact with other inmates, no use of day rooms, and no access to the prison yard.

    The conditions are so “harsh,” he said, that inmates at San Quentin see a move to Vacaville as punishment, preferring to stay at San Quentin rather than receive treatment.

    Stewart testified that prison officials at San Quentin at one pointed considered sending “WWW” to Vacaville for treatment, but discarded the idea because they felt it would be “too stressful” for him. He described medieval existences for some inmates he saw among the condemned when he toured death row in February.

    Some had become what he described as “cell dwellers,” prisoners so mentally ill they did not leave their cells for years at a time; one had not even sat up in bed for months, he said.

    Staffers at the prison were “quite chagrined and even embarrassed” by the conditions of some inmates, Stewart testified. One inmate he described as “quite memorable” was unable to speak, but nodded and took notes “furiously” as Stewart interviewed him, he said. The “notes,” Stewart added, later turned out to be nonsensical “gibberish.”

    Another was convinced that his cell in the prison’s East Block “had been a church and he’d been living there since he was 10 years old,” Stewart said. That inmate began saving his feces because he believed it had value as “money” among inmates.

    “I hate to sound like a broken record, but these people are some of the more severely psychotic patients in the state of California,” Stewart said, yet “the level of care does not match their needs.”

    http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/16/582...#storylink=cpy
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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